Modesty is a virtue not commonly associated with Dallas, but at a time when the super-rich are a focus of political and cultural scrutiny, high-net-worth potentates here do a good job of blending into the background. It may not be obvious to the outside world, but the rich in Dallas are richer than ever.

In what is shaking out as a regularly occurring historical countercycle, the rarefied strata of North Texas’ extremely wealthy are thriving while much of the country is still hung over from recession.

Memory has embroidered the early ’80s Starck Club-Rio Room era as Dallas’ gilded age. The nation was staggering from an oil shock, a hostage crisis and a double-dip recession, but J.R. Ewing and the Dallas Cowboys sent the message into every TV set: The streets were paved with gold.

Yet the size and proliferation of fortunes that now call North Texas home make the Dom Perignon-loving oilmen of 1982 seem like quaint relics. When Larry Hagman ruled from his penthouse atop the Mansion on Turtle Creek, flash and cash were inseparable. Today, there’s a lot more cash but a lot less flash.

The bumper sticker from the late ’80s Texas bust is still seared into memories as a cautionary tale: “Please God, let there be another boom and I promise I won’t piss it all away this time.”

Dallas’ against-the-grain prosperity dates to the dawn of the Great Depression, when C.M. “Dad” Joiner brought in the discovery well of the massive East Texas Oil Field and was promptly bought out by a wily up-and-comer named H.L. Hunt.

Within a short span of years, Hunt, Clint Murchison Sr., Jake Hamon and Algur H. Meadows and their like-minded brethren relocated to Dallas. Friendly financiers like Nathan Adams at First National Bank and Fred Florence at Republic National Bank were willing to lend against reserves and carry cash-poor operators through the rough patches. Soon banking and real estate fortunes were flourishing along with oil.

Asked his net worth, Clint Murchison once quipped, “After the first hundred million, what the heck?”

One doesn’t hear witticisms like that from Dallas’ new billionaires. Generally, one doesn’t hear anything at all from people like Tim Headington (estimated net worth $2.5 billion), Trevor Rees-Jones ($4.5 billion) and Kelcy Warren ($2.3 billion). With his $8.4 billion banking fortune, Andy Beal shuns the spotlight as if it had West Nile virus. Billionaire banker Gerald “Jerry” Ford doesn’t hide from the media, but neither does he court it. Despite being worth nearly $5 billion and living on a prominent Highland Park corner, hotel and energy exec Robert Rowling is a virtual unknown.

It wasn’t always this way. In early 1970s Dallas, opulence was at its most rarefied in the orbit of Troy Post and his pal and sometime partner, Jim Ling. Post was an insurance financier who owned 80 percent of Braniff Airways, all of National Car Rental and a jet-set resort in Acapulco, Tres Vidas en la Playa. Ling built one of the great conglomerates, Ling-Temco-Vought, known simply as LTV.

Post’s massive Park Lane estate, his audacious business deals and his financial reverses were all the stuff of newspaper headlines. The lavishness of Ling’s estate on Gaywood attracted so much media coverage that it became a target for the infamous jewel thief known as the King of Diamonds, who raided Dallas’ oligarchs for a decade and never got caught. In January 1963, when the king entered a second-story balcony window and boosted the family gems while Ling and his wife watched TV downstairs, the heist made the front page of The Dallas Morning News. By 1970, financial reversals forced the Lings out of the house, and H.L. Hunt’s sports-minded son, Lamar Hunt, moved in.

The delicious Post/Ling-style ostentation seemed colossal, but even when adjusted for inflation, the money in play does not measure up to the present scale of affluence.

“It’s clear that an energy supercycle contributed to a lot of wealth locally,” says Brian Bradshaw, an analyst at T. Boone Pickens’ BP Capital Equity Fund. “We had oil go from $20 to $150, and now it’s back closer to $90.”

Ups and downs

Back in 1972, it was hard to imagine a vita more dolce than being friends with Troy Post. On a November morning, Dallas old-guarders arrived at Dallas Love Field at 6 a.m. to board Braniff’s pumpkin-colored 747, nicknamed “Fat Albert,” as it loomed on the tarmac in the predawn cold. Post arranged the early morning departure to ferry the guests to Acapulco for a party for his debutante daughter Judy at Tres Vidas and still have the double-decker jet back in Dallas in time for Braniff’s daily Hawaii run.

Then, Acapulco rivaled Marbella and Monaco as a favored getaway for an international aristocracy of multimillionaires, titled Europeans and the sycophants who filled their tables.

Even in that halcyon time, Post was already litigating with Tres Vidas’ lenders. Within three years, a cash crunch would force him to turn the resort over to the Mexican government. By the ’80s, tropical jungle had reclaimed much of Tres Vidas, and a motorcycle gang squatted in the villas.

When the government stepped in, the debt on Tres Vidas was just over $8 million. Big money then. Today? Not so much.

In a May 2012 profile of Dallasite Darwin Deason, Forbes estimated that the Affiliated Computer Services founder spends $7 million every year operating his 205-foot super yacht, Apogee, with its full-time crew of 17. Banker Jerry Ford’s home address is the University Park estate that once belonged to General American Oil chieftain Algur Meadows. But Ford can also be found aboard his 188-foot yacht, Diamond A, or at his Manhattan townhouse, his beachfront Long Island estate, his Beverly Hills, Calif., mansion, his New Mexico ranch or his Lexington, Ky., horse farm.

Post’s Dallas mansion still stands at the northwest corner of Park Lane and Inwood Road. Decades ago, its four stories, indoor pool, elevator, curved marble staircase, bomb shelter and staff suites were a sensation. When it sold in 1978, the asking price was thought to be enormous — just under $2 million.

Fast-forward to the new era: In 2009, Energy Transfer Partners co-founder Kelcy Warren bought his own Park Lane mansion, just four blocks from the old Post house. Estimated price tag: $29 million.

Pickens’ perspective

Personal riches seemed a long way off to T. Boone Pickens in 1953 when he worked a well site in the Texas Panhandle for Phillips Petroleum and some of the men present began to speculate about how much income would satisfy them — for life.

As Pickens recalls, “This guy asked, ‘If you could sign on now with your company, never get a raise and work until you’re 65, what would your number be?’ I was making $500 a month. The district geologist probably made $15,000 a year, and the district manager probably made $25,000 a year. I figured about $20,000 a year would do it. That sure would be impressive to my wife.”

As history would record, Pickens changed wives, changed jobs and changed tax brackets.

In 1985, as chairman of Mesa Petroleum, Pickens was the second-highest compensated CEO in the U.S., behind Lee Iacocca, at $9.9 million.

By 2005, profits at his hedge fund sent his income for the year above $1 billion.

But as the überrich say, money is just for keeping score. For an avid bird-hunter like Pickens, the real measuring stick was at his bird-hunting paradise in the Texas Panhandle, the Mesa Vista Ranch.

“I knew I was rich when I had a dozen hunting dogs,” he says.

His friend Harold Simmons has had an even more dramatic ride. In 2011 alone, his net worth rose more than $4 billion to nearly $10 billion before dropping back to $7.1 billion in 2012.

“I didn’t think I’d be worth a billion dollars,” says the octogenarian son of an East Texas school superintendent. “So, those big swings are kind of something new. But when you get to numbers that big, it can go down fast and come back fast.”

Soaring fortunes

Last September, Forbes marked the 30th anniversary of its list of the 400 richest Americans, an annual barometer of wealth in America. In September 1982, there were 13 billionaires in the whole country. Five of those lived in Dallas, and they were all named Hunt. Ross Perot landed on that first list with a reported net worth of $325 million. Jake Hamon made the list with $250 million.

The combined net worth of the 1982 Forbes 400 was $93 billion.

Today, Alice Walton and her immediate family have a combined net worth of $107.8 billion.

The 1982 Forbes 400 list had an entry-level net worth of $75 million. Adjust that for inflation and 2012 Forbes 400 entry level should be about $180 million.

But it’s not. It’s not even close.

San Francisco 49ers owner Denise DeBartolo York is the last person on the current Forbes 400. Her net worth: $1.1 billion.

Clues to the dramatic rise in the fortunes of America’s wealthiest people can be found in the stock market. On Sept. 1, 1982, the S&P 500 closed at 118.25. Even amid the current fiscal quagmire, it has been trading above 1,450. If the 400th richest person in America in 1982 had invested $75 million in an S&P 500 portfolio, today that $75 million would be worth right at $1 billion.

“Wealth creation in this country has kept up with the stock market,” says BP Capital’s Bradshaw.

With the explosion of affluence at the very top, amenities that used to be perquisites reserved for CEOs of the largest corporations now have become highly visible manifestations of personal wealth.

In 1982, global behemoth Texas Instruments based its fleet of planes at Dallas Love Field: four small Learjets, two propeller-driven Convairs, a loud and slow DC-3, a Beech Queen Air and a Piper Navajo. Diamond Shamrock shuttled its execs out of Love Field in a Boeing 727 that later ended up in the hands of Donald Trump.

These days, Love Field is a yacht harbor for the ultrawealthy. Pickens has taken his Gulfstream V, painted in the orange colors of his Oklahoma State University alma mater, to Shanghai. Simmons uses his Falcon 900 to commute to his California home, billionaire philanthropist Todd Wagner takes his Gulfstream to Scotland, and dozens of other Gulfstreams, Falcons and Challengers come and go at the whims of individuals such as billionaire Kentucky Derby winner Kenny Troutt, financier Sam Wyly, Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban.

Perils of publicity

Consumption that is too conspicuous, however, can bring unwanted complications, a lesson the contemporary crop of under-the-radar plutocrats seems to have learned.

In the 1930s and ’40s, the Dallas millionaire lived in the national psyche as a benign cartoon. But by the ’50s, all that affluence had begun to grate on the country. Add strident political views espoused by the likes of Houston oil millionaire Hugh Roy Cullen and that benign cartoon started morphing into a menacing caricature.

Cold War lightning rod Joseph McCarthy’s chumminess with Texas oil attracted national attention. During a 1953 McCarthy visit to Dallas, The Associated Press reported that “several muscular aides kept reporters from viewing distance,” and Clint Murchison’s two sons, John Murchison and Clint Murchison Jr., led reporters “on a cat and mouse chase through the Dallas airport” as they delivered McCarthy to their father’s private airplane. He was flown into the mountains of Tamaulipas, Mexico, where the controversial Wisconsin senator was a guest at Murchison’s 75,000-acre ranch, with its massive hacienda designed by Jim Cheek, co-architect of Highland Park Village.

The following year, future Lyndon Johnson White House staffer Liz Carpenter explained in the Houston Post: “The smart talk in Washington political salons is to attribute every political trend most anywhere in the country to ‘Texas oil money.’ If you say it mysteriously enough, it sounds sinister.”

Even the opulence of Neiman Marcus, once a staple of any puff piece on Dallas, became a metaphor for something else.

In a 1948 story on Texas’ super-rich, Life magazine opined, “Peculiarly favorable provisions of the U.S. income tax laws help explain why Neiman Marcus has nearly 300 charge accounts that run over $50,000 a year.”

That same magazine story showed a photo of H.L. Hunt taken clandestinely on a street corner in downtown Dallas above the caption, “Is this the richest man in the U.S.?”

After publicity like that, the H.L. Hunt who had once favored lavish railroad-car drawing rooms, Waldorf Astoria suites and massive horse wagers, became known for parsimony, for not carrying cash and for bringing a sack lunch to the office. He was eccentric, but he was no fool.

Leveraged-buyout specialist Bobby Haas once explained the allure of anonymity. He lives in a princely Preston Hollow estate that sits on a lake and is completely hidden behind mature hedges. Had he not once been partners with the more visible Tom Hicks, most people would have never heard of him.

“It’s hard to hit a crouching target,” Haas observed.

The first in a series examining the wealthy, powerful and influential in North Texas

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About Alan Peppard

MOST UNFORGETTABLE EXPERIENCE ON THE JOB: Reintroducing myself to President George W. Bush after not seeing him for several years and having him reply, "Alan, you don't ever have to tell me who you are."

SOMETHING PEOPLE DON'T KNOW ABOUT ME: I have gills and webbed fingers and toes. I can talk to fish. I'm AquaMan!

IF I HAD TWO SPARE HOURS, I WOULD: Take a walk with my daughters.

I'M ALWAYS ENTERTAINED BY: "The Simpsons," four-part harmony and e-mails from the widow of Nigeria's minister of petroleum.

Hometown: Dallas, TX

Education: Greenhill School/SMU (political science major). I wanted to go to law school, but law school didn't want me. So I became a writer, first for D magazine and then for The Dallas Morning News.